Cannes Check 2014: Mike Leigh’s ‘Mr. Turner’ Cannes Check 2014: Mike Leigh’s ‘Mr. Turner’ EMAIL Sony Classics Welcome back to Cannes Check, In Contention's annual preview of the films in Competition at this year's Cannes Film Festival, which kicks off on May 14. Taking on different selections every day, we'll be examining what they're about, who's involved and what their chances are of snagging an award from Jane Campion's jury. Next up, the first of two British veterans in the lineup: Mike Leigh's “Mr. Turner.” The director: Mike Leigh (British, 71 years old). Few filmmakers have essayed the mundane woes (and occasional joys) of Britain's working-to-middle classes with the vivid specificity of Mike Leigh, though given his distinctive vernacular and customarily heightened sense of the everyday, it's not quite accurate to classify him as a kitchen-sink realist. Either way, as both a playwright and filmmaker, he's as significant and influential a figure on the UK cultural lanscape as John Osborne or Alan Bennett.

A RADA acting student turned art school graduate, he worked as an assistant director at the Royal Shakespeare Company before turning to the screen. He directed his first theatrical feature, “Bleak Moments,” in 1971, but worked predominantly in television for the following 15 years, making his name in particular with the satirical teleplay “Abigail's Party.” He returned to cinemas with 1988's “High Hopes”; two years later, “Life is Sweet” won a number of US critics' awards. The real breakthrough, of course, came with 1996's Palme d'Or winner and Best Picture Oscar nominee “Secrets and Lies.” Bar a moderate reaction to follow-up film “Career Girls,” Leigh's reputation hasn't slipped since, while he's racked up seven Oscar nominations. Leigh is arguably most famous for his unique workshopping process, whereby his scripts are developed in rehearsal with his actors, who aren't always privy to the larger narrative; it's what accounts for the lived-in energy and frequently fluid verbality of his films, though it's often erroneously described as pure improv. That theatrical grounding is also evident in his loyal company of recurring actors, “Mr.

Turner” stars Timothy Spall and Lesley Manville among them. The talent: Spall was a mid-period Leigh regular — featuring in “Life is Sweet” and “Secrets and Lies” — the director and actor haven't collaborated since 2002's “All or Nothing,” but the title role here marks a prominent return. In the supporting cast are Ruth Sheen and Lesley Manville, the two leading ladies of Leigh's film “Another Year”; other Leigh alumni in the ensemble include Peter Wight and Sylvestra Le Touzel. Roger Ashton-Griffiths also stars as Alfred Hitchcock in Cannes opener “Grace of Monaco.” Leigh, as usual, takes the screenplay credit. Most of his regular below-the-line team is in place, including cinematographer Dick Pope (an Oscar nominee for a few years back for “The Illusionist”), editor Jon Gregory and composer Gary Yershon, who worked on Leigh's last two films. Jacqueline Durran, who won an Oscar last year for “Anna Karenina,” has been Leigh's regular costume designer since 2002, but has a larger showcase here than his work usually affords her.

New to the feature crew (having worked on Leigh's 2012 Olympic short “A Running Jump”) is production designer Suzie Davies, who similarly has much to work with here. The pitch: Leigh returns to heritage cinema, after a fashion, with “Mr. Turner,” his first period piece since “Vera Drake,” and only his second non-fiction feature after 1999's “Topsy-Turvy.” Like that Gilbert & Sullivan-focused romp, this is a biopic of a British cultural giant, and has been Leigh's passion project for decades — he has described it as his most expensive and visually extravagant film to date. As it would need to be when the “Mr.” in question is 18th/19th-century Romantic landscape painter J.M.W. Turner, perhaps Britain's most celebrated artist and famously dubbed “the painter of light.” In private, Turner was a difficult, eccentric figure: Leigh's film examines the last 25 years of his life, as he comes to terms with the death of his beloved father, toys sexually with his housekeeper, forms a close bond with a seaside landlady and divides public opinion with his work.

Don't expect a regular Wikipedia biopic from Leigh; I've been told this one is surprisingly earthy, willing to dwell on less savory aspects of its subject, with a big, bold performance from Spall. The prestige: Leigh has remained an auteur who commands respect in multiple circles, from the comparatively mainstream members of the Academy to the more highbrow elders of the film festival circuit. This is his fifth time in Competition at Cannes. In terms of jury awards, his first two were his most successful: “Naked” won the Best Director award in 1993, while “Secrets and Lies” followed with the Palme d'Or. Leigh also served on the jury at the 1997 fest, famously clashing with president Isabelle Adjani; he's never headed the panel, but had that honor at Berlin two years ago. The buzz: Strong. Leigh's consistency gives us little reason to doubt him anyway, but word from advance screenings is that this is an unexpectedly robust, tactile film, with Spall giving the kind of imposing, vanity-free turn that Best Actor campaigns are built on.

Sony Pictures Classics seem confident in the film, whether it catches the Cannes jury's fancy or not; if all goes well, the historical scale and themes of artistic impulse could make this one of Leigh's most awards-friendly films. The odds: Paddy Power are very optimistic about Leigh's chances, putting him in second place with odds of 7-1, but I sense a bit of local favoritism there. ( Jigsaw Lounge is a little more cautious with 10-1 odds.) Leigh's last film, “Another Year,” entered the Competition as a frontrunner, bolstered by a warm critical response, only to win nothing from the jury — who may have felt that the film, however accomplished, wasn't enough of a stretch for him. “Mr. Turner” may benefit from being more of a formal reach for the director, though I sense Spall is represents the film's best shot at a prize. The date: “Mr. Turner” will be the first Competition film out the gate, premiering on Thursday, May 15. Next in Cannes Check, we'll look at “Jimmy's Hall,” the latest from Leigh's compatriot and contemporary, Ken Loach.

Share This By: ibbster 05.11.2014 @ 5:14 PM Most excited for this one, for sure. If he’s good enough, which he probably is, I hope SPC can get Spall into the Academy lineup. I don’t see a lot of strong competition for him for the Cannes prize (but with an eclectic jury, who knows). By: Mark Spall was terrific as Maurice in Secrets & Lies. If Leigh gets another turn like Maurice from Spall, Oscar better take note…. By: Hannahlily 05.11.2014 @ 5:18 PM Super excited about this film. I love the idea of the biopic but don’t quite understand why the execution has almost always got to be so generic and often mind-numbingly dull. Leigh has yet to disappoint me, though, so I have high hopes. CANNES FIRST LOOK: Mike Leigh’s ‘Mr. Turner’ Biopic, Starring Timothy Spall | IndieWire CANNES FIRST LOOK: Mike Leigh’s ‘Mr. Turner’ Biopic, Starring Timothy Spall CANNES FIRST LOOK: Mike Leigh's 'Mr.

Turner' Biopic, Starring Timothy Spall Talk A first image has arrived for Mike Leigh ’s much anticipated and long in-the-works J.M.W. Turner biopic — simply titled “Mr. Turner” — with Timothy Spall in the lead role as the famed Brit Romantic landscape painter. The film was announced this morning as part of the Cannes competition lineup . Check out the new still, below. While no official synopsis has been released for the film, we know that Marion Bailey, Dorothy Atkinson and Paul Jesson co-star in Leigh’s first period piece since 1999’s brilliant behind-the-scenes Mikado tale “Topsy-Turvy.” Cinematographer Dick Pope (“Another Year”) was in charge of lensing, while the National Gallery, the Tate Britain and Royal Academy granted special access to some of Turner’s paintings for the project. Here’s what Leigh has had to say in the past about his interest in the artist, for hints about the direction of the film: “I want to explore the man, his working life, his relationships and how he lived.

But what fascinates me most is the drama that lies in the tension between this driven eccentric and the epic, timeless world he evoked in his masterpieces. I also see rich tragic-comic potential in his often turbulent relationship with the English Art Establishment, especially in his later years, when his increasingly radical work was misunderstood and derided.” Sony Pictures Classics snapped up rights to “Mr. Turner” in March 2013. No word yet on a stateside release. Mr. Turner (2014) Author: Sergeant_Tibbs from Suffolk, England Four years ago, Mike Leigh released one of the finest films of his oeuvre. I saw Another Year at the London Film Festival gala premiere and I still consider it the only perfect film of this decade thus far. As a result, expectations for his long awaited followup Mr. Turner were very high. Especially as it's ostensibly his most ambitious, even moreso than Topsy-Turvy, also a period drama, that ultimately won 2 Oscars, the only Oscars any of his films ever won.

Nevertheless, he's frequently a gift basket receiver at the ceremonies, garnering obligatory screenplay nominations and the odd directing nom, the last of which being for Vera Drake 10 years ago. His organic storytelling, balance of abstract concepts, ability to orchestrate extraordinary performances and his sardonic sense of humour resonate with critics and audiences alike. However, he's not always a crowd pleaser, and Mr. Turner in particular has divided audiences, though not enough to hinder its current awards progress. It's clear to see why. This biopic of the visionary 19th century artist J.M.W. Turner is dense and cryptic. In Leigh's impeccable attention to detail, not just in the production and costume designs, the language is authentic to the convoluted dialect of the upper class of the period and thus it's hard to follow the sparse plot, even for fans. It's unusual for Leigh to adapt a true story, he often starts from scratch, but true to his form his script here defies traditional structure. It's a liberating free form style, sampling scattered moments of Turner's life, not building to anything specific but just exploring what shaped his idiosyncratic perspective.

As a result, the film has grit hard to find elsewhere, and although it's difficult to decipher, it's enchanting for some. Headlining the film is Timothy Spall's colossal performance. He's always been a highlight of Leigh's films when he's been involved, especially his knock out performances in Secrets & Lies and All Or Nothing. This is the role he was born to play. Tossing narrative aside, the film's primary concern is the character study of Turner, a brilliant but flawed man, and each sequence adds layers upon layers of dimensions to him as they swirl in anguish. Spall wears those emotions on his sleeve with a perpetual sneer, grumbly grunts and a piercing stare. The moments where he breaks down have the weight of an earthquake. He's at once a force of nature and has a tender vulnerability. But as illustrated by the exquisite opening shot, he is above all a man of his art and watching Turner paint with a chaotic elegance is fascinating, especially as the results develop over the film.

The ensemble around Spall gives ample support, including the fleeting appearances from familiar faces such as the seething Ruth Sheen as the bitter mother of his estranged children and the delightful Lesley Manville as a sprightly scientist who conducts an art orientated experiment. The standouts however are the warm glow of Marion Bailey, Turner's landlady of his second home and mistress, and the anxious agony of Dorothy Atkinson, Turner's housekeeper who he frequently engages in sex but who suffers from a disfiguring skin disease. Bailey has her great moments, especially when she's overwhelmingly flattered, but Atkinson in particular has such heartbreaking conviction that she bursts from the background of her scenes. What makes the film Leigh's most ambitious project is the cinematography. He's always had a great eye for blocking and making the kitchen sink cinematic, but Dick Pope's work here broke the mould. It's obvious to call it Turner-esque, but that's the intention. It's almost like a David Lean precision of waiting for a cloud to move in the right place. It was indeed whenever Leigh and Pope encountered landscapes like this on other films that inspired them to pursue this film. Some shots cover more ground than he covered in the entirety of his early films.

Not only are the outside shots beautifully composed, but also the inside, using wide angles to keep the grand scale. A collaborator since Happy-Go-Lucky, composer Gary Yershon's forlorn oboe contributes to the rich ominous tone. It's interesting that for a film about art and colour that it's saturated with browns, blacks and greys. The inherently meandering plot does lead it to becoming bloated, but it attempt to be an insight the many different facets of Turner's life and how that feeds into his work, something applicable to all the great artists. It also considers themes of legacy, one perhaps self-aware in hindsight, but important in context. It's a complex film, and it needs another viewing until I'm fully ready to embrace it. As like life, it ends unresolved and I'm still not sure what to make of it. I must be one of the few people who didn't feel it was too long, but only because I was hungry for something more conclusive. Leigh doesn't make it easy for us, but gives us everything to work with. For what I can digest so far, it's a gargantuan achievement.

Due to that inaccessibility and the length of the film, awards attention outside of critic's awards is unlikely. Perhaps it could get a couple of BAFTA nominations, Leigh is not the sweeper people think he is there but it will no doubt get noms for Spall and Best British Film. If there were any justice, it would get Cinematography, Production Design and Costume Design across the board as for even people who didn't like the film can't deny their prowess. Leigh may miss out on that Original Screenplay nomination as the film is looser than his usual output, but particularly because the dialogue needs a double take. It is going to be difficult to imagine where Leigh will go from here but Mr. Turner duly satisfies a thirst for now. 9/10 Was the above review useful to you?

Video: Mr Turner: watch the first trailer of Mike Leigh's JMW Turner biopic - Telegraph Cinema Trailers Mr Turner: watch the first trailer of Mike Leigh's JMW Turner biopic Exclusive: the first trailer for Mike Leigh’s eagerly awaited biopic of JMW Turner, which stars Timothy Spall as Britain’s favourite painter 4:09PM BST 14 May 2014 Mike Leigh’s biopic of JMW Turner, starring Timothy Spall as the British painter, premieres at Cannes this week. Leigh's keenly anticipated film covers the last 25 years of Turner’s life, before his death in 1851 at the age of 76. It was a period of personal upheaval, beginning with the death of Turner’s adored father, but also of extraordinary creativity. “Turner was a compulsive artist,” Leigh says. “Turner had to paint, had to draw, all the time, he just never stopped.

It was an absolute obsession.” The film also looks at Turner’s furtive private life: he had two daughters whom he never acknowledged by a widow, Sarah Danby (Ruth Sheen); was entangled in a complex relationship with Sarah’s niece, Hannah Danby (Dorothy Atkinson), who was also his housekeeper; and in his final years lived with a Margate landlady, Mrs Booth (Marion Bailey), a woman his neighbours mistakenly assumed was his wife. “Turner the man was eccentric, anarchic, vulnerable, imperfect, erratic and sometimes uncouth,” says Leigh. “He could be selfish and disingenuous, mean yet generous, and he was capable of great passion and poetry.” The trailer also shows encounters with painterly rival John Constable (James Fleet) and a young John Ruskin (Joshua McGuire). Leigh may be best known for his small-scale social-realist dramas – from his first film, Bleak Moments (1971) to 2010’s Another Year – but, says the Telegraph’s chief film critic Robbie Collin, it’s worth remembering that he has tackled period drama in the past with great success.

“One of my favourite of Leigh’s films is 1999’s Topsy-Turvy, a biopic of the comic opera-writers WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan set during the making of The Mikado in the early 1880s,” says Collin. “It was a grand period piece, large-scale by Leigh’s standards, with an enormous cast and a rich, textured recreation of Victorian London as its backdrop. Related Content Daily | Cannes 2014 | Mike Leigh's MR. TURNER - Fandor Timothy Spall in 'Mr. Turner' Share: Timothy Spall in ‘Mr. Turner’ “He could be uncouth, gruff, blustery, even crude, treating people badly and denying his children,” writes Kenneth Turan , dispatching back to the Los Angeles Times from Cannes. “Yet he painted some of the most sublime works ever created, and it is that contrast that made the celebrated 19th century British artist J.M.W. Turner a man Mike Leigh has wanted to make a film about for close to 20 years.

‘I always thought Turner was really extraordinary, he anticipates 20th century art and certainly the Impressionists,’ the director says, relaxing at a garden table in what has to be one of the few quiet spots in this hectic town. ‘Plus it just seemed to me that this tension between the personal, this eccentric, obsessive individual, and the epic, spiritual stuff he painted, was a natural cinematic subject. It was my good fortune that no one else had done it.'” “What a glorious film this is,” declares the Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw , “richly and immediately enjoyable, hitting its satisfying stride straight away. It’s funny and visually immaculate; it combines domestic intimacy with an epic sweep and has a lyrical, mysterious quality that perfumes every scene, whether tragic or comic…. In the past, I and others have commented that Leigh’s dialogue in his contemporary movies has an exaggerated, vaudevillian, neo-Dickensian quality.

Now he has actually made a Dickensian movie—accompanied, perhaps, by a shrewdly distanced critical sensibility with something of Peter Ackroyd.” Writing for Screen Daily, Jonathan Romney agrees that it’s “as successful in its tiny details as it is in its epic amplitude: Mr. Turner works at once as a warts-and-all portrait of the painter and his circle, and as a large-scale evocation of Victorian England. The film brings its period so energetically alive that the viewer comes to inhabit Turner’s age as intimately as we’ve inhabited the everyday Britain of Leigh’s contemporary films.” “Timothy Spall—a veteran of Leigh’s films—plays this eccentric, determined London bohemian like a bronchial, cantankerous, randy old toad with backache,” writes Time Out‘s Dave Calhoun . “He grunts and grimaces and gropes his way through life. He talks like a market trader after a crash course in the classics.

Leigh, meanwhile, explores Turner’s life unburdened by any sense of purpose other than an intense, contagious fascination with this man, his work, his times and, increasingly, the inevitable, slow, irresistible trudge towards death.” “Joseph Mallord William is a sore thumb from the opening scene, where he’s sketching a windmill somewhere in rural Holland, poised like a pot-bellied stork among the rushes.” The Telegraph‘s Robbie Collin : “The scene tells you everything you need to know about the man and the places he feels happiest: in short, it’s landscape as portrait, and Turner would have smiled at that. Leigh has come to Cannes with this supremely enjoyable biopic of the English artist known as ‘the painter of light’—someone whose canvases, which reveled in the possibilities of color and movement, could almost be early forerunners of cinema.” “Leigh’s storytelling style here is deliberately episodic,” suggests Geoffrey Macnab in the Independent.

“He follows Turner (1775-1851) in the final 25 or so years of his life as the artist paints in his studio, roams around seaside towns, gropes his housekeeper, courts a seaside landlady, deals reluctantly with family matters and consorts with fellow members of the Royal Academy…. The paradox is that such an ordinary seeming man is responsible for such visionary art.” “Similar to 1999’s Topsy-Turvy, Leigh is interested in warts and all, the spit and filth, rag-and-bone shop nature of the creation of art,” notes John Bleasdale at CineVue. “Mr. Turner is moreover a rediscovery of the English artist; down to earth, suspicious of theory, equipped with a keen eye for profitability and a direct relationship with the landscape he’s come from. Mr. Leigh has done him proud.” Leigh “has managed to conjure largely uneventful if scrupulously well-researched data into a luminous and moving film,” writes Leslie Felperin for the Hollywood Reporter.

“Anchored by a masterful performance by Timothy Spall in a role he was born to play, and gilded by career-best effort from DoP Dick Pope, working for the first time on digital for Leigh to bridge the gap between the painting and cinematography, Mr. Turner manages to illuminate that nexus between biography and art with elegant understatement.” “It’s Mike Leigh’s masterwork and Sony is the right home for it,” argues Anne Thompson , introducing her interview with SPC co-president Tom Bernard. Updates: “To say that two thirds of Timothy Spall’s grimacing, lurching lead performance is made up of nonverbal noises may actually be understating the matter,” suggests Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan . “This movie has more grunts in it than most hip-hop albums. ‘I think the grunting grew in this organically out of this incredible, instinctive, and emotional man who had a zillion things to say but never said it,’ Spall explained later at the film’s press conference.

‘So he captured it all in an imploded grunt … He’s got this burning thing inside him, so rather than say it, it’s just ungh, ungh.’ But what if you don’t speak ungh?” Buchanan offers a “grunting glossary to Mr. Turner.” For Oliver Lyttelton , writing at the Playlist, “Mr. Turner, though not without flaws, is something of a twilight culmination of Leigh’s work, and very much one in which the filmmaker turns his lens on himself, as is so often the case when directors make movies about artists.” “Despite the fact-based characters, Mr. Turner was developed through the same improvisational workshop process as all of Leigh’s films,” notes Variety‘s Scott Foundas , “and the results have same acutely researched and lived-in feel. That’s especially true of Spall, who so fully internalizes Turner that he doesn’t seem to be playing the part as much as channeling it. With his great squashed-in face, Spall shows you every flicker of thought that flashes across Turner’s mind, and every wince of pain that courses through his wearying body.

He conveys the sense of a man driven by a talent and passion even he doesn’t fully understand—a raging, difficult, gruntingly inarticulate soul who finds in pictures the clarity of expression that otherwise elude him.” ‘Mr. Turner’ Guy Lodge at In Contention: “At 150 unhurried minutes, [Mr. Turner is] actually shorter than Topsy-Turvy, but feels more muscular—a sober affair, though often a mournfully funny one. And while the films cover some common thematic ground—the artist’s insecurity, the tension between pleasing oneself and an audience—Mr. Turner’s passions and neuroses feel more peculiar to Leigh and his own work. It’s tempting, even, to view the film as biopic-as-self-portrait, revealing shades of one life through another.” Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn : “At one point, discussing the process of colorization with a colleague, Turner observes that ‘the sublime and the harmonious are contradictory.’ It’s a lesson that Mr.

Turner takes to heart in every scene.” Fabien Lemercier talks with Leigh for Cineuropa, where Domenico La Porta writes in his review that “by presenting the man—sometimes lecherous, at other times esoteric or not far from an enthusiastic madness known only to artists—we are granted the keys to his work and to a whole era.” “What Mr. Turner shares with both Topsy-Turvy and Vera Drake is Leigh’s fascination with the routine details of life in past decades/centuries,” writes Mike D’Angelo at the Dissolve.

“The effort of a fellow artist (Martin Savage, who played vain lead actor George Grossmith in Topsy-Turvy) to obtain, and then marginally repay, a loan from the well-to-do Turner gets as much attention as any artistic endeavors… Near the end of the film, Turner has a daguerreotype taken, asking endless questions of the photographer and concluding, after hearing the replies, ‘I think I’m finished.’ The existence of this exacting yet lyrical film—and of cinema itself, for that matter, with its blend of realism and abstraction—demonstrates how right and how wrong he was, at the same time.” Leigh “doesn’t reveal character through action, but through slips of backstory folded into his interactions,” writes Peter Labuza at the Film Stage.

“Turner’s dialogues with his similarly boorish father (Paul Jesson), his maid (Dorothy Atkinson) who gives him unrequited love without understanding his work, and the various, seemingly random characters he encounters in his life are packed with tidbits that bring this strange artist to life, a fellow who finds solace better in those who know him outside of his work.” “Also crucial to any artist biopic is its cinematography,” writes Isobel Stevens for Sight & Sound. “Turner is convincingly shown as a compulsive painter (the film is bookended with such scenes), but how to approach a subject already associated with such a distinctive visual aesthetic? Most directors opt to echo their subjects’ style— Derek Jarman mimicking Caravaggio ’s chiaroscuro, Peter Greenaway recreating Rembrandt’s tableaux, John Huston emulating Toulouse-Lautrec’s hues with filters and so on.

Leigh follows suit, paying close attention to the patina of light while also faithfully recreating a selection of Turner’s famous sun- and moon-lit landscapes and lesser-known interiors.” The beauty in Leigh’s films has always been “private and inconspicuous,” writes Michał Oleszczyk at RogerEbert.com, “more Yasuijiro Ozu and Jan Vermeer than David Lean and John Constable. Here, it’s as if all that simmering passion for beauty has finally exploded and spilled out in a movie so gorgeous, I actually gasped at times at the beauty of its imagery.” The Competition has “kicked off with a movie so original, adventurous and beautiful; we will all be talking about it in the years to come.” “Leigh’s approach to the evocation of the Georgian/early Victorian era, which was simultaneously the period of the early Industrial Revolution, is unrivaled,” argues Barbara Scharres , also at RogerEbert.com. “As someone who has made an occasional hobby of studying the industrialization of the era, I was blown away by the staggering authenticity.

The interiors, paintings, costumes, textiles, china, pottery, glassware, ceramic ornaments, machinery and devices are all fully integrated into the whole of the vision just as Leigh’s characters. His recreation of the gallery of the Royal Academy with gilt-framed paintings mounted edge-to-edge, wall-to-wall and ceiling-to-ceiling is a marvel.” Updates, 5/16: Richard Corliss notes that his fellow critic at Time, the late Robert Hughes, called Turner “‘the most profound romantic artist in 19th century Europe.’ In ‘the Beethoven-like grandeur of the last landscapes,’ Hughes wrote in 1974, ‘the world of detail and substance has been fully absorbed into the vibration of light, pure self-delighting energy manifesting itself.’ Who put this elemental fury and rapture on canvas? Who was this pathfinder of the sea and sky—’a far more ‘modern’ artist,’ Hughes insisted, ‘than any of the French Impressionists’ a half-century later? He was neither starving artist nor slumming aristocrat.

A poor boy, self-educated, Turner sold paintings from his early teens; he received the esteem of most critics, the Royal Academy and lordly patrons until his death at 76…. Many reviewers at Cannes have cheered the movie as the festival’s first highlight and a worthy contender for the top-prize Palme d’Or. We’re not quite there. We revere Turner more than Mr. Turner—a stark film, gorgeously photographed (digitally) by Bill Pope, but cold and hard on the surface and in what we detect is its heart.” “Spall has always been a terrific actor, but this is the performance of his career,” writes the Voice‘s Stephanie Zacharek . “He’s wholly without vanity: As Turner, he has a chin that doesn’t know where his neck begins; he carries his somewhat portly frame like he’s more preoccupied with light than with grace of movement. This Mr. Turner is no one we’d go out of our way to know; he may be historically significant, but he’s anti-charismatic, a walking negative charge.

And yet somehow, we come to love a man we don’t even like.” “Leigh hasn’t so much transcended the limitations of the biopic as handsomely dressed them up,” writes A.A. Dowd at the AV Club. “He’s made a very straightforward account of his subject’s experiences, never quite managing a perspective on the events depicted…. Mr. Turner is a fine film—and my favorite one of the festival so far, no question—but I’m struggling to see the masterpiece some of my fellow critics have announced. As artist portraits go, it has nothing on Peter Watkins ’s radical, unconventional Edvard Munch , which was truly made in the spirit of its subject.” “There is so much labour on the screen,” writes David Jenkins at Little White Lies, “like Leigh knew that he might only have a single shot at this one, and so put his all into every frame, every edit, every spoken syllable.” Update, 5/17: Notebook editor Daniel Kasman : “The flaccidity of the expansive slice of life by British master director Mike Leigh of British master painter J.M.W.

Turner is both livened and dead-weighted by so much ham on screen it achieves something near a lowbrow kinship to the subtle extravagances of Turner’s grandiose visions of light.” Updates, 5/18: “Not content with mere portraiture, Leigh crowds his canvas with a dense array of period-specific subject matter from experiments in natural philosophy (the magnetic effects of light and color) to infighting among the ranks of the National Academy,” writes Budd Wilkins at the House Next Door. “Leigh also explores Turner’s determination to keep up with the onslaught of technological advances, especially those twin talismans of the era: the railroad and the daguerreotype. Just as steam power put paid to the sailing vessels of Nelson’s army that had been celebrated in many a Turner canvas, the camera’s seemingly objective ensnarement of natural phenomena puts entire schools of naturalistic painting in jeopardy…. But Leigh isn’t so much interested in artist as martyr as he is in the artist as self-contained multitude, containing all the foibles and paradoxes of his age. Mr.

Turner, as it titles suggests, is a portrait of the artist as everyman.” “Leigh and his regular cinematographer, Dick Pope, and the inspired production designers are up to more than an imitation of painting,” writes Wesley Morris at Grantland. “It’s not setting a camera down for a long take or re-creating a particular painting. It’s bringing cinema as close to painting as it’s come since the silent era.” Viewing (7’28”). The Guardian‘s Catherine Shoard talks with Leigh, Spall and Marion Bailey. Updates, 5/21: “Leigh is rude to critics—unforgivably rude—by pillorying poor John Ruskin,” writes Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times. “The aesthete and Turner champion becomes a whinnying, grandiloquent booby: ‘I find myself marvelling at my own depth of perception.’ Never mind. Elsewhere this is a blazingly imagined drama of creativity, with Spall’s genius at bay and at play in an England that gives him both philistine human enemies to mock his art and natural marvels (cliffs, seas, sunsets) to inspire and mirror them.” “Mr.

Turner may be Leigh’s most technically accomplished film to date, but one unfortunately sapped of lasting effect by its antihero’s heaving disposition,” writes Jordan Cronk at Reverse Shot. Update, 5/24: “I could smell this movie,” writes Jordan Hoffman for Vanity Fair. “The dust particles in the parlor, the beetles caught in muslin, the hair springing from the cheek of a butchered pig. Turner was renown as a master of light; its beams, shafts, prisms and reflections are his constant companion. In this pre-Edison-set film, the sun is Spall’s main co-star. From the first gorgeous frame of a Dutch windmill, Leigh and his cinematographer Dick Pope seem unfazed by the challenges of telling a visual story about a great visualist.” Update, 5/26: “The biggest complaint I’ve heard about Mr. Turner is Leigh’s refusal to go the art history route,” writes Filmmaker editor Scott Macaulay . “‘Why was Turner’s work more celebrated than that of his contemporaries,’ one colleague asked. My answer: Google it.

Leigh, Spall and Pope give us something more valuable: an interpretation of an artist that rings emotionally true even as it speaks to a larger ideas of how vision and representation are mediated through time.” Cannes 2014 Index . For news and tips throughout the day every day, follow @KeyframeDaily . Get Keyframe Daily in your inbox by signing in at fandor.com/daily . Share: Cannes 2014: First Trailer Arrives For Mike Leigh's 'Mr Turner' The arrival of anything to do with celebrated British director Mike Leigh certainly gets the juices flowing, so seeing the links to the trailer for the helmer’s next film MR. TURNER in my inbox, got me a tad excited. MR. TURNER explores the last quarter century of the great if eccentric British painter J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851). Profoundly affected by the death of his father, loved by a housekeeper he takes for granted and occasionally exploits sexually, he forms a close relationship with a seaside landlady with whom he eventually lives incognito in Chelsea, where he dies.

Throughout this, he travels, paints, stays with the country aristocracy, visits brothels, is a popular if anarchic member of the Royal Academy of Arts, has himself strapped to the mast of a ship so that he can paint a snowstorm, and is both celebrated and reviled by the public and by royalty. The film is set to open in cinemas in October, and stars Timothy Spall in the title role, as well as Lesley Manville, Marion Bailey, Dorothy Atkinson and Paul Jesson. Watch the trailer below. Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner Has A Trailer | BRWC Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner Has A Trailer SHARE Hello there. Welcome to BRWC. You should follow us on Twitter , or listen to a FiLMiX , or browse around for interesting reviews, interviews and features. Don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter , and tell your friends. BRWC is short for battleroyalewithcheese. Here’s the trailer for Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner, which is released in UK cinemas on October 31. This biopic of the British painter JMW Turner, stars Timothy Spall in the title role, as well as Lesley Manville, Marion Bailey, Dorothy Atkinson and Paul Jesson.

Mr Turner explores the last quarter century of the great if eccentric British painter J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851). Enter your email address to subscribe to our BRWC Newsletter: 4 out of 5 stars Time Out says 5 out of 5 stars Twice before, first with 'Topsy-Turvy' and then with 'Vera Drake', Mike Leigh has punctuated his bittersweet studies of contemporary life with period dramas. Now, with 'Mr Turner', the British director of 'Naked' and 'Secrets and Lies' takes us back to the nineteenth century and the later years of the celebrated, groundbreaking, difficult painter JMW Turner (1775-1851). Sad and joyful, 'Mr Turner' offers a wonderfully rich tapestry of experience and digs deeply into a complicated, contradictory life. Timothy Spall – a veteran of Leigh's films – plays this eccentric, determined London bohemian like a bronchial, cantankerous, randy old toad with backache. He grunts and grimaces and gropes his way through life. He talks like a market trader after a crash course in the classics.

Leigh, meanwhile, explores Turner's life unburdened by any sense of purpose other than an intense, contagious fascination with this man, his work, his times and, increasingly, the inevitable, slow, irresistible trudge towards death. We observe Turner's fondness for his elderly father; his sexual relationship with his meek housekeeper (Dorothy Atkinson); his rejection of his children and their mother; his arms-length acceptance by the lions of the Royal Academy; his late-life relationship with a Margate widow (Marion Bailey); and the mockery of the crowd when his work turns experimental. 'Vile' and a 'yellow mess' concludes Queen Victoria at an exhibition: the presence of royalty in a Mike Leigh film is just one of its many welcome surprises here. Mortality hangs heavily over ‘Mr Turner’, which covers roughly 25 years and is a poetic, brilliantly choreographed patchwork of moments and episodes. The film often has a wistful, regretful air, but alongside sadness sits great joy – there are moments of wicked humour. All of this is engrossing and evocative, and the sense of time, place and period is unusual and beguiling.

But what makes 'Mr Turner' doubly fascinating is the mystery at its heart: what defines an artist's relationship with his or her subject? Can it be explained? Can you trace clear lines between the creator and the work? They're impossible questions. So what Leigh does is sketch the emotional ties between Turner and the places (and less frequently the people) he paints. He bursts into tears while sketching a young prostitute. He ties himself to the mast of a ship in the rain. He strides across a hilltop ruin as five wild horses gallop past. Our sense of what inspires Turner as an artist comes less from watching him work (the film is pleasingly light on literal scenes of the artist at his easel) than from a series of astonishing, time-stopping shots of land and sea. The film's opening sees two women walking along a canal in the Low Countries. Later, we see waves lapping against a beach and cliffs. Leigh and his cinematographer Dick Pope essentially create a series of filmed paintings that celebrate the spirit of Turner's work, and these reflective, quiet moments have great power. 'Mr Turner' is a long-cherished project for Leigh.

It's impossible not to equate the ideas in the film about working and living as an artist as reflections on the filmmaker's existence – finding time for a personal and family life; negotiating patronage; feeling strongly about the work of contemporaries; tolerating critics intellectualising your work. But if Leigh is in some ways holding up a mirror to himself, that doesn't distract from the larger mirror he holds up to Turner and his time. Not only do we end up with a vivid, surprising and soulful sense of one artist and his work, but Leigh also offers us a commanding view of a city, London, and country at the dawn of the modern age and of a man being overawed and overtaken by new technologies such as photography and the railways. As ever with Leigh, 'Mr Turner' addresses the big questions with small moments. It's an extraordinary film, all at once strange, entertaining, thoughtful and exciting.

By: Dave Calhoun 4 out of 5 stars Average User Rating Mr Turner, review: 'Spall is like a moulting, phlegmy Gruffalo' - Telegraph Film Reviews Mr Turner, review: 'Spall is like a moulting, phlegmy Gruffalo' Mr Turner, Mike Leigh's biopic of the artist, features Timothy Spall's finest performance since Secrets & Lies, says Robbie Collin 5 Cert 12A; 149 mins Dir: Mike Leigh. Starring: Timothy Spall, Dorothy Atkinson, Marion Bailey, Paul Jesson, Lesley Manville In the new Mike Leigh film, Mr Turner, you can hardly miss the Mister. Joseph Mallord William is a sore thumb from the opening scene, where he’s sketching a windmill somewhere in rural Holland, poised like a pot-bellied stork among the rushes. The scene tells you everything you need to know about the man and the places he feels happiest: in short, it’s landscape as portrait, and Turner would have smiled at that.

Leigh’s film is a supremely enjoyable biopic of the English artist known as “the painter of light” – someone whose canvases, which revelled in the possibilities of colour and movement, could almost be early forerunners of cinema. Turner is played by Timothy Spall , who gives the finest performance of his career to date, surpassing even his work in Leigh’s Secrets & Lies 18 years ago. It won Spall the best actor prize at Cannes this year, and the question now is just how far the role can take him: the the Baftas, almost inevitably; as far as the Oscars, very possibly. It’s a musty performance, one that gets in your clothes and hair, and that’s absolutely meant as a compliment. Spall coughs and shambles about the place like a moulting, phlegmy Gruffalo, eyes bright and hungry, bottom lip jutting proudly forward like the spout of a custard jug.

Related Articles Surprise Bafta snub for Mr Turner 09 Jan 2015 His repertoire of grunts alone comfortably extends past a hundred, and you wonder if perhaps Spall went Method for the role, living for years in a sty until he got the voice, posture and smell just right. But beyond the troughfuls of fun tics, Spall makes Turner tenderly and totally human, which has the effect of making his artistic talents seem even more God-given. The film begins in 1826, with Turner 51 years old and in the ascendant. He works from a studio in his London town house, where his housekeeper Hannah (Dorothy Atkinson) and elderly father, William Senior (Paul Jesson), keep things ticking over. Turner’s dealings with them both, including solemn groping of the former, are brisk and straightforward. The painting process, though, is very different: Leigh shoots it in a way that it sometimes resembles an occult ritual.

Early in the film, when Turner’s father visits a paint shop to replenish his son’s supplies, you see the pigments are piled up on silver platters, like spices in a souk, or potion ingredients, begging to be mixed. Light is what moves Turner, and he moves with the light. The film spans the quarter-century until his death in 1851, and we follow him wherever he goes. At a patron’s country estate, he tussles with a gloomy rival (Martin Savage) and tries to sing a Purcell aria – he does it amusingly badly but also tenderly, and finding the precise point of articulation between the two is pure, neat Leigh. READ: Timothy Spall and his wife on their sea voyages In Margate, Turner meets a friendly landlady (Marion Bailey), who comes to play an important role in his later life. At the Royal Academy, we see him buzzing around, joking with friends, dishing out advice and, in a perfect, self-contained skit, winding up John Constable (James Fleet). The film is studded with such gem-like supporting roles, many of which are taken by regular Leigh players, including Lesley Manville and Ruth Sheen.

Picking favourites is too difficult, but let’s just say the lisping writer and patron John Ruskin, hilariously played by Joshua McGuire as an oblivious smartypants, has stwuck a chord with a few of us cwitics. In its shape, Mr Turner is very much like Topsy-Turvy, Leigh’s superb, under-seen 1999 film about the comic-opera writers WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, set during the writing of The Mikado. But this is an even more ambitious work about the making of art, in which the process is not just shown as an almighty, if often very funny, strain, but something that, when done correctly, and with the stars aligned just so, can bear the artist past death and into history. When Leigh recreates the scene that inspired Turner’s 1839 masterpiece The Fighting Temeraire, he shows the artist finding hope not in the old, exhausted warship being tugged to her last berth, but the squat, blackened tugboat in front. “The ghost of the past,” says one of his friends, nodding sorrowfully at the larger vessel. “No,” Turner barks. “The past is the past. You’re observing the future! Smoke.

Iron. Steam!” Leigh and Spall’s genius is to show us both in one man: Turner is future and past, progress and history, tugboat and Temeraire. What the other newspapers are saying Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian : "Mr Turner is funny, humane and visually immaculate, hitting its confident stride straight away. It combines domestic intimacy with an epic sweep, and a lyrical gentleness pervades each scene, tragic or comic. Every line, every detail, every minor character, however casual or apparently superfluous, is absolutely necessary." Geoffrey MacNab, The Independent : "Mike Leigh's biopic is a rambling, richly detailed character study with a magnificent central performance from Timothy Spall.

This may be 19th-century costume fare but it is made with the same precise attention to its protagonists' yearnings and comic foibles as we find in Leigh's contemporary dramas with Spall, whether Secrets and Lies or his woefully underrated All Or Nothing." Dave Calhoun, Time Out : "Not only do we end up with a vivid, surprising and soulful sense of one artist and his work, but Leigh also offers us a commanding view of a city, London, and country at the dawn of the modern age and of a man being overawed and overtaken by new technologies such as photography and the railways. As ever with Leigh, 'Mr Turner' addresses the big questions with small moments. It's an extraordinary film, all at once strange, entertaining, thoughtful and exciting." Nigel Andrews, Financial Times : "It’s a beautiful film because it isn’t afraid of beauty’s uglinesses. Artists don’t personify the ideal or dazzling worlds they envision. They are the workshop, not the work. So it’s right, in a biopic, that we see the mess of the creative life." David Sexton, Evening Standard : "Mike Leigh takes the painting seriously enough.

He says he used actors in the film who could actually paint and Timothy Spall, who plays Turner so magnificently, learned to do so for the part. Yet the film never tries to explain Turner’s art, merely showing his mastery by the speed and certainty with which he attacks the canvas, scrubbing it with a brush, rubbing it with his finger, spitting at it even."

Question: Who starred in the title role of Mike Leigh's 2014 film Mr Turner?
Answer: Timothy Spall